Kitchen Cabinets #1: Upper Cabinets are installed

During the week, my wife and I live in a studio apartment in Manhattan. On weekends we escape to our weekend house. We bought it about two-and-a-half years ago. My wife fell in love with the view. It is spectacular, one-of-a-kind. The house, however, was less than ideal from my perspective. The floors were a mess. The trim and doors were nasty. Everything needed painting. And the kitchen was crying out for updating. In the intervening years, we put in oak floors (that was a lot of work), re-sculpted the yard and painted. In the summer of 2008, I began construction of new cabinets. Since it’s a weekend project it is taking longer than I expected.

This weekend, however, a major event occurred: I installed all of the upper cabinets. Here’s what the kitchen looked like Saturday morning:

Here’s what it looks like now:

The cabinets are made from Maple plywood. The edges are done with iron-on edgebanding. The finish on the doors is lacquer rubbed out with wet-sanding in 800, 1000, 1500 and 2000 grits with a final compounding with automotive rubbing compound. By the way, did you know that a random-orbit sander can be used to rub out the compound? just ripped a square of terrycloth and stuck it to the velcro pad.

The cabinets are assembled using pocket screws done with my Kreg jig. It turns out that this is very useful. You’ll note that the right-most cabinet isn’t installed. That’s because I lost 1/4” along the way and at 18”, 17 3/4” of available space wasn’t enough. Big problem? No. I just disassembled the cabinet and ripped 1/4” off the top, bottom, door and back of the cabinet. It took all of 30 minutes to re-size the cabinet. Today I installed it and it fits very nicely.

The cabinet above the microwave has the shop-made pulls I crafted. I have a box of scraps of exotic hardwood. I turned some 1”x1” stock into a cylinder, polished it on the lathe and split it with my bandsaw. I then made little blocks of cherry to hold the pulls off the face of the doors. I’m quite proud of them. Sadly, neither my wife or I think that they work in this instance. I’ll be going with a simple wire pull from Ikea instead. It preserves the Scandinavian modern look that we both like.

Next week, I get serious about the base cabinets. Stay tuned…

-- Life is too short to suffer bad food and lousy speakers